Circuit Board Snow White
by TaraSoleil
Summary: Despite the court banning her use of computers, Darcy still has The Monster & hacks like a boss into the most beautiful and curious computer system she's ever seen, filled with home movies from the perspective of a man named James Barnes, combat techniques, a Russian dictionary. And as she watches, it's being erased. What's a ten-year-old hacker to do but save what she can?
1. Chapter 1: Darcy Was Here

Circuit Board Snow White  
Chapter 1: Darcy Was Here

"Darcy," the girl heard her mother call from downstairs. "What are you doing?"

"Cracking a satellite!" she shouted back.

There was a pause during which Darcy Lewis worried her mother might finally start enforcing the court-ordered ban on any and all electronics, but the moment passed and her mother shouted up the stairs. "Okay, just don't get caught this time!"

The girl smiled at her computer, an ancient boxy thing in a yellowing case that had once been a pristine ivory color. It was The Monster, and she was its creator. Her parents had been sneaking her odd components since the day they left court. Her father, Milton J. Lewis, was not a man to put up with heavy-handed decrees from small-minded authoritarians, and he wasn't about to teach his children to roll over and take them either. Her mother, Sarah, simply didn't like being told what to do. Darcy still remembered when a random woman at the grocery store had the audacity to suggest she try a cereal with less sugar to help prevent Ben and Bing from being so hyper; Sarah Lewis had flown not into a rage but into a lecture, a thirty-minute education on neuroscience and nutrition and all the delicate chemical balances that linked the two and how sugar played little to no part in her sons' behavior, which, by the way, was none of her damned business.

So when the court ruled that Darcy wasn't to touch a computer until she turned eighteen, neither of her parents would stand for it. They didn't bother with appeals. They simply ignored the ruling, bringing their daughter whatever she needed to make a computer of her own.

The Monster was ugly, but it worked. And with it, she saw the world.

One ear listening for her mother's call to the table, she typed her way back through the commands she had used, erasing any evidence of her tampering.

The judge meant well. He had wanted her to learn a lesson, and she had: Don't get caught.

It was her new mantra, not that she knew what a mantra was at ten years old.

"Dinner in five minutes!" her mother called. "Go wash your hands!"

"Okay!" she said and deleted the last command, making it look as if she had never sent her signal into that station at all save the addition of a short line of nonsense coding spread across three separate commands. It's all she ever left. It was her 'Darcy was here'.

She hurried from her room and did as her mother said, washing up and joining her family at the table. Her brothers were fourteen and sixteen now, four years removed from that incident in the grocery store and considerably calmer. Sarah, a researcher in neuroscience, had studied her sons and experimented with foods until she found the ones that made them act out, removing any and all products with the suspect ingredients until her boys were no more rambunctious than any others of their age. She had published a study and been awarded a grant to continue her research in a University setting. Culver had offered the best package, so the whole Lewis family had picked up their lives and moved to West Virginia.

Darcy really didn't mind; her interest in computers and programming made her very odd among the pre-teen crowd. Really there was no one who she could talk to about it, not even in her own family.

"What's the plan for after dinner?" her father inquired.

Darcy mumbled around her mashed potatoes, "I dunno."

"Have you looked into the university servers?"

"Milton," her mother huffed. "You shouldn't openly encourage her. Give her what she needs, but don't make suggestions!"

The man nodded. "Yes, of course. You're right. I should not tell you to look into the university servers or to try to see what that new professor is researching or why it involved several large men with concealed weapons under their black suits. I would never make such a suggestion."

Her brothers snorted as their mother sighed her disapproval.

"I'm sorry, I wasn't listening," Darcy managed through a giggle. "What was that you did not suggest?"

"You know, I've quite forgotten," he said, scratching his head and frowning.

"Alzheimer's," Ben said solemnly.

"Mom, you better get him to your lab," Bing agreed.

"Don't think I wouldn't like to. There's got to be some medical explanation for how thick your father's skull is," she said. "And let's not even joke about that."

"Why not? You're like five minutes from curing it," Bing shrugged unapologetically.

"Be that as it may, forgetting oneself is never a thing to joke about. Imagine slowly losing every memory, every piece of information that made you who you are. Who would you be? Patients who have responded favorably to my treatment still aren't the people they were. How can they relearn a lifetime of experiences?" She shook her head, wiping away the tear that always came when she started talking about her latest project.

"Sorry, mom," the boys chorused.

"Enough of this depressing talk," Milton insisted. "We're going to leave this table happy. So… There once was a man from Nantucket—"

"No!" Sarah cried, hurling a dinner roll across the table at him. "There will be no limericks at this table. Not ever!"

"Oh, but, honey."

"I set the rule when we were married. Nothing has changed. No. Limericks."

It was enough to break the tension and sent them from the table with smiles on their faces. Ben and Bing were charged with dishes, Darcy with sweeping, their parents settled into the sofa to watch the show their daughter had set to playing on the TV.

After she had done her chore, she ran up the stairs and started cracking the codes for Culver. Anything that involved suspicious men in black suits and guns was worth looking into. She typed away furiously, finding holes and slipping through them. She didn't know the professor's name, his department or what he was researching, but she knew what to look for. Heavy firewalls and certain key phrases and codes. The government was nothing if not predictable. She found it before bedtime.

In the morning, she managed to squeeze through one of the firewalls, but then it was time for school.

School was difficult. It wasn't that she was too smart. When it came to regular class work, she was pretty average. Where she excelled was computers, and it was her inability to touch them that made school so tough. The teachers had been informed of her restriction, so whenever the class had computer lab, Darcy was sent to language class instead. She didn't get to research topics on the desktop in the back of the room with the other kids. She couldn't bond with anyone over a group project when she was stuck alone in the library with the encyclopedias. Most of her classmates didn't even notice. Those that did were told that her parents were extreme Luddites and refused to let her use electronics. This, plus her whole wheat sandwiches and carrot sticks, made her the weird hippy girl. Whatever.

She hurried from school and broke through three more barriers before dinner.

The delay between each small success was torturous, not to mention dangerous. The longer it took, the more likely it was that someone would notice and bring the weight of the Feds down on their house again.

Luckily, it was Friday, and Darcy was allowed to stay up as late as she wanted on Friday nights. She sat, back hunched and eyes narrowed, typing feverishly, setting up proxies and rerouting paths to keep herself safe from detection. It was nearly midnight when she finally found her way through.

Darcy had hacked countless computers at CalTech, MIT and Georgia Tech. She had seen so many research papers, experiment notes and student reports that, even at her age, she knew what everything academic looked like. The information filling her screen that dark night was different, unlike anything she had ever seen. The files were not arranged in a simple, analytical pattern that a computer would understand; these were branching curves that looked like the tentacles of a jellyfish spread wide as it drifted through the ocean. It was beautiful.

Normally, once she hacked a system, reading through the information contained within was unnecessary. In part, because she knew she would not have understood it, but mainly Darcy cared about the challenge of cracking the system and not the content of that system.

Not this time.

This system she wanted to explore, to understand, to save.

With no clear beginning, she clicked a file at random.

Her computer screen filled with a film, a home movie by the look of it. The person holding the camera was walking down a street, looking around at the cars as they passed, eyeing the girls in their pretty dresses. The clothes were wrong, old. The women were in dresses with shoulder pads, their hair pulled up into weird tube curls around their foreheads. The men were in huge suits, their pants hiked high on their waists. It was an old movie, but the clarity of the picture was better than anything she had ever seen from her grandmother's home movie collections. And, unlike Grama Lewis's movies, this was in color.

She moved to another file, which turned out to be much like the first. Each file in that cluster was the same, a first-person look at a time long ago. There were videos where the camera operator stopped and interacted with people passing on the street or chatted up a girl he knew – she knew it was a man from his voice and when his large hands would come into view. It took eight files before she found the man's name.

He was walking down a street, looking down at his polished shoes, adjusting the fit of his olive jacket when he looked up, the camera moving so fast it almost made her dizzy. Then he was running down a side street into an alley.

"Why don't you pick on someone your own size?" the camera man said. A ragged young man turned on him and made to throw a punch, but camera man got his shot in first, clocking the other in the face and kicking him in the butt to send him running.

The camera man turned, looked down at a skinny guy wiping blood from his face and commented, "Sometimes I think you like getting punched."

"I had him on the ropes," the skinny guy said, his eyes taking in the cameraman. "You get your orders?"

"Sergeant James Barnes reporting for duty."

Darcy scrambled to find a notebook to write down the name. It was the first time she had heard him use it, first time she had heard him use anything but the silly moniker of 'Bucky'. This was a name she could research. She watched as the man guided his friend, Steve, through an awkward meeting with a girl. Darcy couldn't really blame Steve for being less than interested in the girl with her long face and stringy blond hair.

As she watched, the film cut to Steve and Bucky arguing. She understood it was about Steve wanting to join the army, but the file was corrupted. It skipped and the audio was out of sync; she could see by the reflection in a glass-framed poster that Bucky wasn't speaking, but his voice shouted over Steve, ordering him to leave the recruitment center, to go home, to stay out of the war. She waited for the file to correct itself, as they sometimes did, but Bucky was leaving with his date.

Other files, she found, were equally as corrupted. Always the same issue of the real dialogue being replaced by Bucky shouting. With each error, she got the impression it was a bad dubbing more than anything else.

Her fingers clacked out the commands to return to the previous page with its tendrils of interconnected files. It was different. The spaces between files seemed larger.

"What?" she muttered, confused.

As she watched, she saw what was wrong. The files were being deleted.

"Shit," she cursed, too worried for the system to get any real thrill from using the word. "No, no, no!"

She knew the danger she was in. The server operators at Culver might have noticed her presence, might have notified to authorities. If she were smart, she would tear the cord from the back of the tower and sever her connection immediately. Darcy never claimed to be smart. She slammed her fingers against The Monster's keyboard, typing the command to copy the files almost as fast as the files were being removed.

Soon, far too soon, the interconnecting web was gone. There were only three files left, arrayed in a neat row, as precise and orderly as any computer system she had ever hacked.

She guided her mouse over the first file with a shaking hand. Clicking it open, a line of code filled her screen. It took her a moment to recognize it as a dictionary from English to some foreign alphabet she didn't know. She scribbled down a few words in the odd letters to figure out what she was looking at later.

The second was a cache of more files, each one apparently a combat technique.

The last was strangest of all. It held words in that odd alphabet, each attached to a file with a picture or video. The sequence made no sense to her. It showed a picture of a sad little boy all alone in the cold, a rusted tool, a fire blazing in a big heater, dawn, and so on for ten separate words.

Her father was right to be concerned about this professor and whatever it was he was researching. This computer system was terrifying for reasons she couldn't comprehend.

Still, as was her custom, she opened the base code of that third file and scrawled her signature across it.

"Darcy was here," she muttered and began the meticulous task of retracing her steps to hide her presence in this odd computer system.

* * *

A/N: The early chapters of this are heavily influenced by Hackers (1995), a film I love beyond sense and reason.

The rest came about while reading Captainwittyoneliner's A Tourist in the Waking World over at AO3, which has sadly gone un-updated for over a year. I loved the idea **SPOILER ALERT** of Bucky's consciousness haunting Darcy, but I found myself wondering how I could change it to be where Bucky was physically appearing in her life. Enter Hackers.

Go read A Tourist... and watch Hackers ($2.99 on YouTube) if you can and if you want a seriously dated but inexplicably awesome computer-based film to entertain you.

Oh, and tell me what you think of this thing!


	2. Chapter 2: Lost Connection

Circuit Board Snow White  
Chapter 2: Lost Connection

Darcy spent the better part of her summer vacation clacking away at her computer, scouring every inch of every server Culver had at their three campuses. It was time wasted. That amazing computer system was gone.

"What's that face for?" Ben asked, sticking his head into her room late one July afternoon.

"I can't find it," she whined.

"Have you tried doing it the non-dorky way?"

"Huh?"

"You sound so smart when you say that," he snorted and walked away, leaving her to wonder what on earth he meant. To Ben, the only things involving a computer that wouldn't be considered dorky were things that blew up or things that went fast. She knew he didn't mean for her to play a computer game, so he must have meant that she ought to search without a computer. The girl scowled as she sat back, trying to sort out what real world method she could use to figure out what happened to her computer system.

Unlike a typical code, it had no maker's mark. Most programs had something – even something as small as the code she left as a signature of her hacks – something that she could decipher and use to find the originator of the system. The firewalls had been impressive but, again, not so unique to clue her into who might have had a hand in making it.

In a flash, it came to her.

"Dad!" she shouted, jumping up and racing down the stairs to find her father.

Milton was in the living room, feet up on the coffee table and a book resting on his chest. That ended when Darcy careened toward him and leapt into his lap.

"Dad!" she shouted again. "Dad, that professor with the men in black suits, where'd he go?"

"Go?" her father wheezed. "What do you mean?"

"His computer is gone."

"You found it?"

"Yeah, hacked it months ago," she said. "But it was erased. I can't find it anymore. Did he leave the school?"

He considered her question a moment. "You know, I'm not sure."

"If he left, were would he go?"

"Never talked to the man directly, but I can ask around."

"Thanks, dad," she said and started running back toward her room.

"Where do you think you're going?" her mother demanded, halting her daughter's progress.

"To my room?" the girl said.

"No."

"Huh?"

"Don't say 'huh', Darcy. It makes you sound illiterate," her father shouted from the couch.

"You are going outside," her mother informed her.

"What? Why?" she groaned.

"To get some exercise, to make friends, to avoid the destruction of your corneas at so early an age. Pick a reason," the woman said and gestured to the front door. "The park is just down the street. Don't get into any fights. Don't talk to strangers. Come back when the streetlights turn on."

Darcy grumbled and complained all the way to the park, taking her annoyance out on the sidewalk as she stomped her red sneakers down with all her might. She threw herself onto a swing and scowled for an hour.

"It's Dorky Darcy!" a voice cried from behind her.

"I didn't think she could stand the sunlight," another added.

Darcy rolled her eyes and started pumping her legs to get the swing moving. Her taunters came around the playground; they were two girls a year ahead of her in school, Karli and Chloe. The pair weren't twins but could easily have passed for it; they were tan and blond and did tumbling… whatever that was.

"Are you allowed outside without supervision?" Karli asked. "I thought people like you needed to be watched at all times."

"I'm ten not a senile octogenarian," Darcy retorted, happy to throw in one of the words from Bing's summer study list.

The two glanced at each other, thrown by the eleventh grade word. Darcy kept swinging while they decided what to do. She didn't think they would try to attack her. They were mean, but as far as she knew they had never done anything more savage than tuck a rude note into someone's book bag. Even if they did try something, she had enough experience scrapping with Ben and Bing to break their noses. She has some pretty pointy elbows, and she knew how to use them to her advantage.

Karli turned to her, smug smile on her glossy lips. Whatever she had planned to say never came because the girl's face turned ashen and her eyes huge. Darcy assumed it was the old 'made you look' ploy Bing still loved to use even at sixteen. She wasn't going to fall for it.

She kept her face carefully posed in angelic innocence and continued to swing as the girls screamed and ran away.

"Lame," she muttered.

She pumped her legs hard, gaining enough altitude to lift off the seat. With a final kick, she launched herself up and out of the swing, flying through the air and landing some distance from the swing set.

"New record!" she announced. "Ten points to Darcy!"

She spun around to measure in sneaker-lengths just how far from the swing she had gone but froze at the shadow looming on the far end of the playground. It wasn't just the shade of the trees that lined the park. It was a man. He was tall, wide-shouldered and wearing a heavy coat and long pants even in the heat and humidity of a West Virginia July. She studied him thoroughly in case she needed to report him to the police, but he stayed where he was, half in the shadow of the huge poplar that only the tallest boys were able to climb.

"I totally see you!" she shouted.

The man didn't run at her declaration. There was something about the slope of his shoulder that struck her as being amused by the comment, though, if asked why, she couldn't have given a reason.

She didn't know what to do. Running home would have been the smart thing, but the only path back to her house took her past the man. She wasn't even sure if running away would cause the man to chase her. So she stood, waiting for him to move one way or another. According to her SpongeBob SquarePants watch, it took twenty-three minutes before the man disappeared into the dark shadow under the nearby thicket of trees. For a few minutes, she could make out his shape, darker than the darkness around him, and then he was gone.

As she stood, waiting for her heart to stop hammering inside her chest, the streetlight came on.

Hoping the man wasn't waiting just out of sight, she ran. She ran as fast as she could past the poplar and all the way home, slamming and locking the door behind her.

"Darcy, really," her mother chided. "Did you have fun?"

She opened her mouth, ready to scream out her terror. Then she stopped. Would her mother believe her? She had no proof that the man had been there. She couldn't identify him, and he didn't do anything more than stand in a shadow. Her mother would most likely claim she was exaggerating or, worse still, making it up completely just to avoid having to go outside to play again.

"Yeah," she mumbled. "It was fine."

"See," she smiled and pointed the girl toward the bathroom. "Dinner in ten minutes. Wash your hands."

"Okay."

That was how the rest of summer went for Darcy. She spent her mornings scouring Culver's servers and the afternoons outside searching the shadows for that man. He never appeared again, but his presence that day did have one beneficial outcome. He had scared Karli and Chloe enough that they never returned to the playground.

Her father went back to work in August and reported that the professor he had mentioned was still there, leaving Darcy to hunt the Culver website for newsletters and press releases that might contain some announcement of some other professor's departure from the college around the time that system was erased.

By then, she had learned that the strange letters in the dictionary file were Cyrillic, specifically Russian, so she started by looking for names of Russian origin. It seemed weird hunting for a Russian operative as if she were a detective in one of those espionage novels her mother loved so much. Especially since she had just learned about the Cold War last school year, and how it had ended the same year she was born.

Listening to her parents talk about work, she knew politics and factions existed in academia; it stood to reason such things continued to exist on a global scale as well. Just because the USSR wasn't the USSR anymore, didn't make Russia and her satellite nations any less cloak and daggery. Who was she to insist the KGB – or whatever they called themselves now – wouldn't try to stick their fingers into American stuff like universities and cutting-edge computer software development? Perhaps that professor her father had mentioned was being guarded by those men in black suits. Or maybe he was a government contractor and those men in black were there to check on his progress. Maybe he had deleted his original coding when he found out about Russian sabotage, and the only thing left was what they had implanted to spy on his brilliant new system.

As summer drew closer to an end, Darcy lay awake in her bed wondering which of her wild theories was correct. A ten-year-old's grasp of realism was tenuous at best; the possibility of Russian sabotage seemed as likely as the inventor of the computer system being a Russian immigrant. Truthfully, she just worried that she would never see that beautiful and unique system whole and functional again. She had saved what files she could, but on their own they were nothing much to look at, just old home movies.

School started again in September. It was no different than the year before.

All her classmates were the same. She was just as average as before and still had to go to language class or the library whenever the rest of the class was in computer lab or doing research. Each evening, she did her homework, had dinner with her family and spent the rest of the night searching the internet. In sixth grade, she was still focused primarily on Culver, but as time moved on so did she. Texas A&M and Georgia Tech all gave her nothing. Some heavy firewalls and extremely high-level encryptions at CalTech offered her hope, but they were hiding secure codes for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. She quickly backtracked out of there, knowing the JPL and NASA fell under government domain. Hunting through all the top-rated universities in China and Singapore only succeeded in teaching her some Mandarin and Malay. There were wisps of the program in a few ridiculously antiquated Russian systems, but it wasn't enough like the one she had encountered to raise her hopes.

By the time her eighteenth birthday drew near, she was fairly certain whoever removed those files had moved them into the realm of government agency.

It was one of the few things Darcy had never intentionally hacked while under the court order for fear of what the repercussions would be to her family. Now that she was just days away from her eighteenth birthday, however, she knew what she would buy with the money she had saved from Grama Lewis. She also knew exactly what she planned to do with it.


	3. Chapter 3: Eighteen

Circuit Board Snow White  
Chapter 3: Eighteen

Darcy waited patiently behind the line of students vying for attention and kudos points from their new professor. Sadly, she wasn't here to suck up. With just over a month until her eighteenth birthday, she still needed special treatment when it came to her class work. This had all been so much easier when her parents talked to the principal, who would then send the information down to her individual teachers.

"Hi," Darcy said.

"Yes," the TA said. She thought it was meant to be a question, but it came off as very brusque.

"You said notes and quizzes would be emailed out, but I don't have a computer."

"Use the computer lab on the third floor," the woman said.

"I can't. I'm not allowed to use computers."

That got the woman's attention. She paused while stuffing her notes into her bag and looked at Darcy, properly looked. Her hazel eyes narrowed down to nearly nothing. "Not allowed?"

"Yeah, court order."

"Ah," she said, her face reconfiguring itself as she puzzled out whether Darcy was pulling an initiation prank or if was telling the truth.

"I can get the county clerk to fax over my paperwork if you need, but it's only for five more weeks. If you could just let me take paper quizzes until next month, that'll solve a lot of problems. I can get the notes off someone in class."

The woman nodded slowly. "I'll talk to Professor Avelito about it."

"Thank you," Darcy replied, turning to leave.

"What did you do?"

"Took down the third largest bank in the US with a computer virus when I was nine."

"Fuck."

"Yeah," she shrugged and walked up the stairs and out of the lecture hall.

That had gone better than she expected. The last professor she had spoken to informed her that if she insisted on hand-writing her papers, he would deduct twenty points. She marched from the history building straight to her advisor's office to have him replace that class with anything else that would fill the requirement, ending up in POLS 1001, _American Government_.

 _Five more weeks_ , she thought. _Just five more weeks._

A package arrived three days before her birthday with Grama Lewis's return address written on it. She got another, considerably smaller, package from her parents the next day.

"Are you going to open them?" Beth questioned.

As far as roommates went, Beth had been pretty great so far. She came with her own mini-fridge that Darcy was allowed to use. She helped Darcy set up her loft, and together they hung fantastic purple curtains and an epic number of fairy lights. She did question Darcy's lack of computer and phone almost constantly the first week, but that stopped when Darcy offered up the lie of not being able to afford either until the rest of her student loans came through.

Darcy hugged each of the packages in turn and set them on her desk with reverence. "I don't want to be tempted."

The girl gave her a look that spoke to just how odd she thought Darcy was but said nothing more. "So, big birthday plans?"

"Open my presents," she said.

"After that…"

"Nothing special."

That was a lie. Darcy did have plans. _Big_ plans. Ones that involved the new computer from Grama Lewis, Culver's unlimited high speed internet and several hours of setting up proxies to hack into as many government servers as she could in as short a time as possible – the faster she cracked their codes, the less chance there was of them tracing it back to her.

Clearly she wasn't stupid enough to say that out loud.

"Darcy. You aren't home with mom and dad anymore. Let's get you a fake ID and go out!"

She paused, lost as to what to say. She had friends, sure, but she had never had friends close enough to have them want to hang out, let alone break the law together. Admittedly, Darcy's idea of breaking the law ran a bit contrary to the average person's.

"Yeah, okay."

"Awesome. I know a guy. He can make up an ID good enough to fool a lax bartender." As if to prove her point, she pulled a plastic card from her handbag and held it out. Darcy studied it a moment, noting how obviously fake it was and wondering how it could fool anyone.

"I think I could manage one," she insisted. "Could I borrow your computer?"

"Of course!" the girl replied with a wave of her hand. "Just don't break the thing. I know you're, like, stupid with technology."

Darcy forced a laugh and sat down at Beth's desk, typing with speed and purpose, easily breaking the encryptions on the DMV's website and accessing the template for the West Virginian official driving licenses. She cloned it to Beth's computer, deleted her tracks – after dropping her signature into the coding of the system. It would have been easier and made for a better ID to just hack the system to request an ID, but she knew that would have sent up a red flag to her probation officer. She pulled up the file in Photoshop and added some hairline imperfections and odd specks, then printed it out. She pulled a nearly depleted Starbucks gift card from her purse and glued the printed ID in place.

"Laminate that and I think that will fool even the strictest bartender in town," Darcy declared less than an hour later.

"Fuck," Beth cried. "You've been holding out on me, Lewis. How much do you charge for these things?"

"What's that guy you know charge?"

"Fifty bucks."

"Ninety, then. Mine is way better."

"Make me one then. I'll help you pay for that new computer of yours." Beth dug into her purse and started pulling loose twenties from the pockets and odd corners.

"Sixty. Friends and family discount," she insisted. "Plus I'm using your computer to make it happen."

"Truth!" Beth said. "I think Maggie down the hall has a laminator. I'll see if I can borrow it."

She threw the door wide and ran down to knock on the girl's door. By the time she got back, she had collected orders for five more IDs and had even gotten advanced payment from three of them. Suddenly, Darcy wasn't so worried about acquiring all the new computer components she had been circling in catalogues.

Nine hours later, the glow of friendship and possibility had not worn off. Not after her IDs had gotten half the girls on their hall into the best bars downtown. She wobbled down the quaint cobbled sidewalks of the town attached to Culver in heels that only a teenager could think were sensible. Darcy, though smart, was no more clever than any other eighteen-year-old when it came to things like high heels. She giggled as she nearly toppled over into a trashcan, only remaining upright by sheer determination.

"After the next bar, these things are coming off," she decided.

"I hope you mean the pants," a guy smirked at her.

"Dude, smarmy much?"

"Aw, come on, sweetheart, don't be like that," he groaned and sidled up to her, slipping a hand over her shoulder and pulling her close. "Let me buy you a drink."

Darcy was far too inebriated to wield her pointy elbows efficiently. The jackass held her tight, letting his hand slip down her side, groping a breast before taking a firm hold of her hip.

"Dude, let go!"

Beth was too drunk to do anything more than sway menacingly at him before turning and emptying her stomach against the wall.

"Looks like it's just you and m—" his declaration ended in a harsh cry of pain as he was ripped away from her.

Darcy staggered and stumbled but managed to turn and watch him fly across the sidewalk. Her eyes had trouble focusing on the man left in his place. He looked like someone she knew but not someone she had ever met, which made no sense. He was tall and broad-shouldered. His hair was long, and so was his face. Actually, he looked like he disapproved of her life choices.

"Am I supposed to thank you now? I think I'm supposed to thank you now," she slurred.

He said nothing as he turned and summoned a taxi. Darcy managed to get Beth into the backseat and giggled her address to the driver before waving to the man she knew-but-didn't-know. He stood stock still on the pavement as the cab pulled away, his face impossibly sad. The taxi turned as he did, vanishing into the darkness and reminding her where she had seen a man like him before.

oOo

" _Ow_."

"Don't. It hurts."

" _Ow_."

"Seriously. Shut it."

" _Ow_."

"Beth, I swear on all that I hold sacred, I will smother you with a pillow if you keep whining that loud."

Silence met her threat. Her roommate's bed squeaked as she rolled over and, presumably, fell back asleep until the worst of the hangover passed. Darcy would have loved to do the same, but she was still thinking. It hurt her head like she never thought anything could, but she couldn't stop. There was something about last night that was important, but it was lost to the blur of alcohol.

" _ow_ ," Beth moaned quietly into her pillow.

Darcy crushed the pillow over her own head and willed the confusion and pain and sickness away. It didn't work, though after a while she did manage to fall back asleep. When she woke, it was getting dark again, the fairy lights bathing the off-white cinder-block walls in a warm glow that was far kinder to her hangover than the daylight had been.

With a grunt, she shoved herself off the bed and down the ladder. Beth was still snoring into her pillow, forming a small whale-shaped ocean of drool on the orange cotton. She found her pain killers and downed three dry before dragging herself down the hall to the bathroom for a shower, a tooth-brushing and a glass of water, not necessarily in that order. Maggie had her door open as she sat on the floor of her room, looking no better than Darcy felt.

"Great birthday," the girl slurred. "Totally doing that next month for mine."

Darcy's stomach turned at the thought of dealing with this agony again so soon, but she managed a noncommittal noise that she could claim as either an affirmation or a refusal whenever the subject was brought up again. She really hoped it wouldn't be mentioned for at least another year, though.

By their powers combined, the shower, pills and water helped her regain her humanity. She returned to her room, forced Beth to wake long enough to take some pain killers and chug a glass of water, and finally opened the presents her parents and Grama Lewis had sent her. She tore into the brown paper wrapping, throwing it over her shoulder in her zeal to reach the treasure within. Her parents had finally added her to their phone plan and upgraded the whole family to smartphones. She gave the pristine device a pet before turning her sights on the real prize.

Grama Lewis did not disappoint. She had found the most powerful laptop available, and it was even purple. Darcy held her breath as she plugged in the cord and set the machine to running. Its fan barely whispered where The Monster groaned out its annoyance at being made to work. She waited impatiently for the computer to run through its initial start-up greetings and tutorials. It had been years since she had been allowed to work with anything so advanced.

Somehow she had gotten it into her head that if she just had a newer machine, she could track down that gorgeous computer system that she had lost all those years ago. It was childish, and she knew it. If the system had been deleted or disconnected, she would never see it again, but she still had hope.

She didn't know how long it would take, but she'd find what she had lost.


End file.
